


A Gift To Mankind

by IAmTheMonster



Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Alexander Pierce is a Creep, Angst, Brainwashing, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Implied Relationships, M/M, Psychological Torture, Self-Hatred, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 16:39:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3417941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IAmTheMonster/pseuds/IAmTheMonster
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before there was a man on the bridge, there was a man in a fine tailored suit with pretty promises.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Gift To Mankind

**Author's Note:**

> The relationship between Pierce and the Winter Soldier has always fascinated me so I tried to capture what Bucky might have felt about the former Secretary of Defense. Honestly, I'll probably delve deeper into this in a longer piece once school stops kicking my ass so, if you'd be interested in that, let me know. 
> 
> As always, all feedback is very much appreciated!

There is blood on the lapel of the second man to his right. The soldier can smell it as it blossoms before his eyes, an ugly stain on the white silk collar of the man’s uniform. He supposes it’s not really a uniform. It’s a suit, steam pressed with perfect pleats in the legs and three mother of pearl buttons on the cuffs of the sleeves. He’s not used to seeing men like this one with their cookie cutter smiles and eyes that assure him everything is going to be okay when he knows, in his heart, that nothing really is. 

This man is not a soldier. Perhaps he is a sharp business man from the West come to see the wonders of Kiev’s black market. Maybe he’s giving the orders now. Maybe… There are endless possibilities and without orders, he isn’t fit to pass judgement.

He eyes the man more closely, blue meeting blue in a fierce struggle for dominance. But there’s nothing left in the soldier’s eyes except the fire the Russians put there, and even that is a dwindling flame. 

His opponent returns his gaze with sharp, glittering eyes, reflecting light like diamonds and reminding him that you don’t need a gun in your hand to wage war.

“Take him,” the business man concludes. He speaks in clipped English to the man beside him and even his voice commands attention. “Along with the rest of the KGB’s toys. I want it all.” 

Cold metal shocks his system and there is a gun pressed to his temple. Cooperation is necessary, unless he wants to die. He’s not afraid. Fear is not an emotion the KGB equipped him with, but he thinks things might be different now. 

The man’s smile haunts him in his sleep. 

 

He cuts the brakes of the car and rigs a simple explosive to blow on impact. It’s an easy job, involving stealth and not much more. No finesse, but it is the first time the business man praises him.

His name is Pierce. He is different now, although the soldier can’t make out what has changed from their previous meeting. His memory is foggy, but he knows this man. He knows his eyes and the blood stain like a rose on a white tablecloth, a memory he shouldn’t have. 

The man’s hair is peppered with silver and his eyes still glitter behind the black-rimmed glasses he sports. His attire commands respect. Crisp white shirts under various jackets. Ties of all colors, a new one for every meeting it seems. There is no blood on his collar but his face has begun to wrinkle and the soldier can see almost every vein running below the skin of his hand when he reaches out to splay fingers across where his flesh meets the gifted metal appendage. 

He will kill Pierce one day. The man before him is only human. He shouldn’t be allowed to drag his fingers over the scar tissue of his shoulder hard enough to make him hiss. He shouldn’t be allowed to poke and prod at his metal arm with various instruments, but he is helpless to stop him. Maybe he doesn’t want to stop him. Because of those promises. Those whispered words of gratitude. 

“I’ll do so much for you,” Pierce insists as two scientists work on his arm, welding sparks flying off the metal. “You’re more than I could have ever dreamed. You’re going to help me save the world.” 

They shove a rubber mouthguard between his lips, but he thinks it might be nice to be a hero.  

 

His name is Pierce. He is an older man. His hair is gray, tinged with white at the edges, and his eyes glitter behind shiny glasses that reflect light like diamonds across the room. His collar is always perfectly turned down and there is never a wrinkle in his jacket, especially not anywhere near the fancy, laminated badge on his chest that reads, “Secretary of Defense”. His face is full of creases, running out from the corners of his eyes. He doesn’t smile very often but, when he does, the lines deepen, crinkling into all manner of patterns in his skin. 

He will kill Pierce. He can see the delicate bones in his wrist. He could snap them under his fingers like they were nothing but straw. Pierce is not a friend. He is trusted only because the soldier has no other choice. He is told to trust him by something deep within him, a feeling that they’ve met before. He doesn’t move when the man approaches on assertive steps. 

“You’ve shaped the century,” Pierce assures him. 

He doesn’t respond, just sits sullenly in the chair, metal cuffs closing down on his arms. He isn’t afraid. He isn’t programmed to feel fear so it doesn’t exist. The needle of his emotions hovers somewhere between anger and a blank void of emptiness that makes him feel as though he is circling a drain to nowhere. 

“We’ve almost done it. I couldn’t have gotten this far without your help.” Pierce smiles with too much edge, like a sharp blade biting into flesh. 

Then they turn the machine on and he knows he won’t remember this conversation, even as blackness begins to creep into his vision. Screaming does nothing but make his throat raw. 

 

He doesn’t fail missions. They’re handed to him and he crosses them off in bold, black lines. A politician in Moscow. An architect in Dubai. An assassin in Brazil. A businessman in Texas. They blend together into a faceless crowd of dead. 

He wonders what this unsettling feeling is in the pit of his stomach. A twisting, a gripping, as though a hand is squeezing his intestines. The fingers grow tighter and tighter until he’s sure he will burst. He doesn’t know the feeling’s name, but it hurts.

A public bathroom in St. Petersburg. He left his kill strangled in a bathroom stall. Doesn’t remember the target. Doesn’t remember the reason. He only remembers the glimpse of himself in the mirror smeared with streaks of water damage. Black mask. Long brown hair. Blue eyes. Empty. He wonders if it is possible to be dead and alive all at the same time. 

But the mission is the priority. The mission is of the utmost importance. The mission will change the world. The mission will ensure their success. His success. The mission. Is killing him. 

Numbness feels so good. 

 

This time is different when they haul him from his icy bed and strap him down into the chair. Pierce is there, watching from the corner, and he knows just enough not to scream when they dig tools between metal and skin. Routine maintenance, they state somewhere in a report of perfectly typed lines. He tries to remember when he learned how to read but the tool sinks deeper and he swears they’re going to rip that arm right off of him. He can’t say he’d mind. 

_Barnes_. 

The noise is a whisper in his mind, an insidious hiss. In a matter of seconds, he breaks a guard’s jaw, snaps it in two with metal fingers grating against white veneers. He’s bleeding profusely now. Maintenance is another word for torture. The metal clamps close around his arms and the treatment is like a million needles to his skull, piercing straight through until there’s nothing left but compliancy. 

He doesn’t have a name. He has a mission. He has a target. He has whispered promises of freedom. No, not freedom. He doesn’t want freedom. He wants recognition and Pierce promises it to him. He promises that this next mission will be the crowning jewel of his legacy. 

He believes him. 

“Your work has been a gift to mankind,” Pierce insists as they drag the body of the guard from the room. The man is sobbing but he’s transfixed by Pierce’s gaze, unreadable behind his glasses. “You’ve shaped the century.” 

A mechanic is beside him, maneuvering his arm back into place, fixing the little imperfections in an otherwise perfect weapon, like needles in his head. 

“I need you to do it one more time.” Pierce slides a folder across the table to him. 

The lettering on the brown paper exterior means nothing to him. A jumble of abbreviations. S.H.I.E.L.D. He hasn’t heard of it and, if Pierce doesn’t explain, it’s not relevant to the mission. He raises his other hand— the one that’s still his— and begins to sift through the reports. A man. Steven Grant Rogers. Alias: Captain America. The super soldier. He despises the idea that Pierce has another perfect soldier because this is his glory. His mission. His release. He will take it by force if he has to. 

And that’s exactly what Pierce wants. Death and destruction. A chaotic new world order and he assures him that he will be at the front. He will be the hero of their better world. 

There’s a glossy photo in the file and he stares down at it. Captain America, complete with his stars and stripes. A shield. He thinks this will be easy.

 

“I knew him,” he says and every single cell in his body is straining to remember why the man on the bridge looked so familiar. Why, instead of anger or emptiness, he felt… confusion. That strange reluctance that bubbled up from a part of him he was sure had been frozen over long before they’d stuffed him in a cryo tank. 

And it wasn’t just the man. It was the woman, too. She made him angry and he didn’t know why. Gunfire didn’t drive him into a rage. He’d been shot at enough that a bullet to the head barely fazed him. Normally. 

His gaze drifts to his arm as he examines the charred circular pattern her attack has left. Electricity. Why is it familiar? The world around him is shattering, one painful shard at a time. He feels like he might break as well. 

He turns his eyes back to the man before him. Pierce’s lips are set in a thin, white line and he knows that he’s said the wrong thing but the confusion is overpowering. The man on the bridge. He called him something. A name. 

_Bucky_. 

His brow furrows enough to betray his desperate attempt to put together a puzzle with none of the proper pieces. 

“Your work has been a gift to mankind.” 

His eyes drift to Pierce, searching his face as though the man’s very skin holds the answers he needs. He speaks the same words. The same scripted lines are thrown back in his face. His brows knit together.

“You’ve shaped the century, and I need you to do it one more time.” 

The furrow deepens and he grits his teeth. He considers the words carefully. He’s sitting in a chair. They are repairing his arm. There was a man on the bridge. Steven Grant Rogers. Captain America. He’d seen him on an earlier mission, but that wasn’t the only reason that he knew him. There was something more. More than the photographs presented to him. More than the orders to kill. There is something there. 

But he is supposed to follow orders. His orders aren’t to remember. His orders are to forget and to kill. But… the man with the shield. The woman with the red hair. Why are they familiar? No one is familiar to him. He can’t forget it, no matter how hard he tries to push their faces from his mind. He purses his lips as he attempts to decipher his own labyrinth of thoughts. 

“But I knew him.” 

The chair squeaks and Pierce rises with all the commanding presence of a freight train. 

He tenses, fingers curling for a weapon of some sort, in case the man decides to hit him again, but he knows even if he had a gun, he wouldn’t attack. It’s not his orders. Pierce knows the man on the bridge and he wants that information more than anything else. Wanting is a strange thing, enough to shock himself into complacency as Pierce speaks to a man in white. 

“Wipe him and start over.” 

He clenches his teeth harder, focusing hopelessly on the memory that is trying to claw its way free of his broken mind. He knew him. He knows him. Steven Grant Rogers. The woman with red hair. He wants to scream. 

Why? 

He wants to tear the lab apart, but what is the point? There are always labs and always doctors and always, always orders. 

He runs his tongue over his lips. Defiance. He opens his mouth for the mouthguard, snarling. Silence. Anger rips through the room like the electricity from the woman’s attack. 

_Natalia_.

He doesn’t hear anything else, just the white noise of his own mind as he tries desperately to cling to this one thing. This memory that’s so dangerous Pierce wants to rip it away from him. It must mean something. The name. He needs to hold onto the name. 

_Bucky. Bucky. Bucky._  

But the machine follows orders as well as he does and he knows it will take everything from him. His screams echo off the walls until his throat is raw and he can’t remember why he was screaming in the first place. 

 

It’s him. It’s _him._ He’s looking at himself. His picture with his name in bold, white letters. He looks defiant and he wonders if that’s what he feels beating in his chest. Defiance. He thinks that’s impossible because he wasn’t programmed to feel anything like that. Just kill. Kill, kill, kill. 

But he pulled Captain America from the river. He’d saved his life and, according to the display in front of him, it wasn’t the first time he did it. 

It was a fluke, a story woven so intricately that his damaged mind couldn’t decipher fact from fiction. It wasn’t him. 

He reaches out a hand and traces over the rough etching in the glass. Real, concrete evidence that he existed in another life. 

1944\. A train. The water was cold. He died a hero. _A gift to mankind_. _One more time_.

 

He isn’t the hero of the story. He is the villain. James Barnes is synonymous with the Winter Soldier. The assassin. The HYDRA killer. The monster with dead eyes. Empty blue. No depth. No meaning. Nothing. 

Redemption is a loaded gun pressed hard against his temple, the bullet begging to be released from its metal cage. And who is he to deny that request? 

Full circle. Death begets death begets emptiness. 

Dead eyes. He traded his soul for the empty promises of a madman. 

On a cold New York sidewalk, redemption is the last thing he needs. 

 

_Your work has been a gift to mankind._

_You’ve shaped the century._

_And I need you to do it._

_One._

 

_More._

 

_Time._

 

He’s never wanted to forget anything so much in his life. 


End file.
